New Istanbul exhibit traces relationship between press and art

By Handan Kazanci

ISTANBUL (AA) – A new exhibit bringing together a comprehensive selection of works tracing the relationship between the press and art will open on Wednesday at Istanbul’s Pera Museum, the organizers said.

Titled “And Now the Good News: Works from The Nobel Collection,” the exhibit will be open from April 13 to Aug. 7, according to a Tuesday statement from the museum.

The display “focuses on the dialogue between art and the mass media, taking the invention of the printing press in the late 18th century and the formation of periodic journalism in the 19th century as a starting point,” the statement added.

Featuring around 300 works by 164 artists using a variety of media such as painting, photography, collage, drawing, installation, and video, the show focuses on artists such as Andy Warhol, Alberto Giacometti, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Andreas Gursky, Jenny Holzer, and Bedri Baykam.

Drawn from Annette and Peter Nobel’s Press Art Collection, the exhibit is curated by Christoph Doswald.

- Rolling with the changes

“The exhibition discusses the most critical issues in science, culture, and politics in the last 150 years, and reveals the important changes (that) occurred in the last 20 years and their impact on the press art,” it added.

Taking the newspaper as an intellectual starting point, the show focuses on the relationship between text and news, how the invention of photography shaped society, and the powerful effect totalitarian systems have on mass media.

Quoting the collectors Annette and Peter Nobel, the statement said: “It is astonishing how many artists have temporarily, incidentally or repeatedly used newspapers as a basis for their works, even painted from newspapers or even designed them themselves.”

“This is a conscious act and can be seen as a call to deal aesthetically with everyday phenomena. Art becomes a symbolic living world,” the Nobels added.

The statement also quoted curator Doswald saying: “Under the genre term ‘Press Art,’ artistic products are gathered that are related to the printed word and the printed image in the broadest sense, that elevate the cheap, daily renewable consumer good to an expensive individual item: Collages made from newsprint; paintings whose model was provided by a press image; photographs showing a magazine cover; gouaches applied to newsprint; silkscreens based on a star photograph from a celebrity magazine.”

“The paintings, collages, assemblages, drawings, and prints in the collection of Annette and Peter Nobel tell of a time when the relationship between the direct original and the media image still existed,” he added.

The Pera Museum, located in Beyoglu, on Istanbul’s European side, is open 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, and Sundays 12 noon-6 p.m. Special entrance on Fridays 6-10 p.m. is free, and students are admitted free on Wednesdays.

For more on the exhibit, visit peramuseum.org.